Trying the Dragon Age 2 Demo in Stereo 3D Mode with 3D Vision

The new Dragon Age 2 game is coming on 8th of March, but there a demo available already for a few days, so as a somewhat fan of the RPG genre I downloaded it and tried to play it in stereo 3D mode with the help of 3D Vision. The Dragon Age 2 Demo does support both DX9 and DX11, but in the demo version you are not able to play with the highest quality levels as well as probably not having all the quality controls available. Still the game runs quite decent in stereo 3D mode by default, although there is no official 3D Vision profile available for it yet, the default convergence level needs some adjustment in order for the close-up scenes to be Ok. After adjusting the convergence you should still play with lower depth levels in order to avoid excessive crosstalk/ghosting as well as having some of the objects that are far away from you seem doubled, because of higher separation. There are some elements such as the mouse cursor or the unit info bars that render in 2D and some other minor issues, but then again with lower depth levels these shouldn’t be such an issue for most people.

When running in DX11 mode I’ve noticed that the game is pretty heavy even for top hardware when running in stereo 3D mode, you get unacceptable framerate. There are also some occasional shadow corruption on the terrain (black triangles), and this may be somewhat related to the use of DX11 features as it does not happen in DX9 mode. In DX9 the game is comfortable playable in stereo 3D mode, you get decent framerate, so it seems that the DX11 mode in the demo may be somewhat buggy and hopefully in the final game this issue will be resolved.

5 responses so far ↓

Actually, Directx 11 doesn’t work in the demo… you can SELECT it, but really, nothing in-game changes except the bad frame rates as far as I could tell. HOWEVER… you can de-select “vsync” in the setup, and DirectX11 runs smoothly… but again… there’s no real difference, since the demo didn’t include DX11, so your best bet is to run it in DX9.

If you select DX 11 and set the quality on High. all the DX10 calls will be executed. In oder words DX 10 will work. As for the poor DX 10-11 support…this has been fixed in the final release. Also they recommended not to use dx11 in the game as seen here:http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/294/index/6151799

Is there anything technical that you are a aware of that would prevent Nvidia from releasing game profiles outside of major driver releases, say as 1kb txt files for example? The lack of these profiles makes it pretty difficult to play games on release day. They often don’t run their best, especially in 3dVision mode.

Perhaps its some issue with the Microsoft driver certification process that causes this?

I’m still wondering why they don’t develop profile distribution system like how the antivirus software updates are being installed for the user, without having the user keep track of updates for the drivers all the time. I think Nvidia has tried such process last year with the announcement of the Optimus technology, but I don’t know if it still works this way or they have dropped it, as the Optimus uses application profiles as well. The only possible issue with this method is if the profiles for new games also need some fixes or added features in the display drivers or the 3D Vision driver as well…